


Dreams

by theclockiscomplete



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-02-18
Updated: 2015-02-18
Packaged: 2018-03-13 15:41:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3387182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theclockiscomplete/pseuds/theclockiscomplete
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Since the dream crabs, Clara has had a pathological fear of sleeping that warps her dreams into a ferocious blend of nightmare and memory. The Doctor takes her to an astoundingly beautiful lake of breathable liquid designed to induce a dream state, vowing to join her in her nightmares and restore peace to her mind. Neither of them has a clue what they're in for.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dreams

**Author's Note:**

> This could stand alone, but I'm considering adding chapters that chronicle their journey through Clara's fears and traumas-- she's had so many. This would also give me a chance to reference and explore non-canon adventures and experiences that I didn't have the patience to flesh out into entire works but would function well in this dreamscape. Alternately, I could just end this on the reassuring note that all will be well, resulting in a tidy and visually appealing one-shot. Please let me know which you think would support the tone of the piece.

“I can’t believe how beautiful this is.” Clara drew the large, thick robe closer and nestled her head on the Doctor’s shoulder. The lines in his face caught the blue and green glow of the phosphorescent water lapping the rock on which they sat, making him softer and more alien than she’d ever seen him. She, too, was transformed by the soft light; it mingled with the brown of her eyes and lingered somewhere between jewel tones and foreign sunset. Before them stretched a gently rippling lake-sized body of a substance that the Doctor had described as a kind of breathable, warm lavender oil. Gentle glowing mist swirled lazily across its surface, skimming across the tops of the Doctor’s drawn-up feet poking out from beneath his blanket.

He smiled down at Clara and pressed his lips ever so briefly against the crown of her head, allowing the knot of concern in his stomach to slowly unspool. Soon, he would find a way to ease the bags under her eyes and still the panic in their depths when she flailed awake from unintended and involuntary catnaps.

He should have guessed this would happen, mentally kicked himself on the regular for having left her alone in her TARDIS-supplied room for a handful of nights before his exasperated ship had replaced the door to his library with the door to Clara’s room, behind which he’d finally heard her crying out and thrashing in her sleep. The past few weeks had been a resulting maelstrom of soothing destinations, tests to prove to her that she was really awake, and only once did he lightly tap her forehead and shut her mind down for a few moments of respite—too many times risked a dependence.

The problem wasn’t that Clara couldn’t fall asleep; she was nodding off almost constantly. The problem was what happened when her mind’s defenses fell and panic combined with sleep paralysis, resulting in her alternately whimpering, thrashing, and occasionally screaming. He could hardly blame her. This was the unmentioned part of traveling with him—eventually, something happened that messed with his friends’ psyche in a way that reached deeper than the garden variety arrests and battles. He would fix it. He was the Doctor.

A nudge to his ribs made him jump and look down at the mischievous glint in Clara’s eye. “Are you ready?” she asked. He exhaled and scrubbed a slow hand over his face. The purpose of this substance was to induce a dream state—his idea was that it would retrain Clara’s mind to associate dreaming with pleasure and rest. The catch: It was highly corrosive to anything without a consciousness, which meant clothes. But Clara refused to submit to dreams without the promise of having him there in them, and that was what mattered. And so it was with a gentle, mutual squeezing of hands and hearts that the two of them slipped out of the soft materials covering them and into the warm lake before them.

“How long until it starts to work?” Clara whispered when they were up to her chest. Where the water rippled out from them, it was a shimmering transparent gold, and she traced bright lines in the water before her.

“You have to breathe it in,” The Doctor explained, and when he moved his hand, fuchsia dripped from his fingers to splash golden back into the aurora-hued liquid. “Much like drinking tea, but you’re actually allowing it into your mind and body.”

Clara wrinkled her nose and dabbed at the water with a finger. “So how many other…species will I be breathing in?”

The Doctor chuckled, the tension going out of his shoulders. “None,” he promised. “It’s not a municipal pool. We’re here about a thousand years before this place has ever been discovered.” He squeezed the small fingers intertwined with his own. “It’s even more beautiful under the surface,” he said. “We’ll have about five minutes to enjoy it all—well, a little less for you since you’ve got the singular respiratory system, but I’ll be right behind you.” Clara looked up at the stars and took a shaky breath.

“Looking forward to a good night’s rest,” she admitted. “Thank you,” she added after a moment. The Doctor raised her hand to his lips, never breaking eye contact. They would die before they admitted it, but the increase in casual touches and general affection did wonders for their friendship and went a long way in easing what would have once been insurmountable awkwardness at their current predicament. It was Clara who took the first step into deeper water and tugged him along behind her.

The Doctor hadn’t exaggerated; the view under the surface was a collection of colors so vivid as to render Clara speechless. Luckily, speech was redundant in the low-level telepathic field, and she felt the Doctor processing and savoring all of her wonder and joy. They viewed everything through a haze of gold particles falling like snow through the blue and green auroras knifing around them, illuminating organic structures in colors Clara wasn’t certain she’d seen before. The liquid felt remarkably like water, and yet they walked across the bottom of the lake with around half the resistance of an Earth pool. The Doctor reached out and touched one of the beams zigzagging lazily past them, and it splintered into a hundred small, luminous fish that raced every which way, dazzling Clara’s eyes.

She felt her lungs constricting and realized she was holding her breath, not quite able to trust what felt so very much like liquid surrounding her. She passed a frantic glance at the Doctor, and he took a deep breath to demonstrate and calm her, simultaneously flooding her mind with peace. Finally she inhaled, blinking against the stinging in her eyes. Immediately, her senses relaxed and she understood the power of the lake. It wasn’t that it caused someone to be tired, but rather that it primed the body for sleep—and hers had been past the breaking point for days. She felt the Doctor’s mind nudge hers in the direction of a tunnel ahead of them, and she did her best to focus on moving with him, feeling noodly and unable to recall her fears of drifting into unconsciousness. As the tunnel grew closer, it seemed to dim, and Clara blinked against it, confused in a distant corner of her mind. The Doctor knew before she did that five minutes was a gross underestimation of her level of exhaustion, and when she stumbled, he already had the arm not linked with hers out to catch her.

She’d never been particularly difficult to carry, and was even less so in the substance he’d come to mentally refer to as dream fluid, and he rubbed a thumb back and forth across her shoulder as they approached the tunnel. Clara did her best to stay awake, but the last thing she saw was her Doctor gazing down at her with a kind of emotion that transcended the concept of time etched into his face, haloed by what seemed to be phosphorescent crystals. Then she was gone.

Sleep was an option the Doctor rarely took, opting instead to shut down different portions of his mind that needed rest and waking them before heading off on his next trip. Watching the small human asleep in his arms, the human his hearts adored above all, he felt a fierce pride and protectiveness streak through him. He would be there in her dreams to help her fight the memories and the fears that ravaged them.

He approached the pool of stars nestled at the bottom of the cave at the end of the tunnel and laid Clara gently on its surface. He didn’t think he would ever quit marveling at the human body, no matter how many times he saw it. Clara seemed to him a sculpture of the finest quality, from the delicate fingers still intertwined with his to the scar above her left breast, earned from a fight with a particularly protective ice dinosaur. She’d saved his life that day, and on so many others. He’d told her before that Time Lords were a scientific innovation—the result of centuries spent studying and perfecting the weaknesses of other humanoids and borrowing from the genetics of countless species across the galaxy. Humans, he thought, were more perfect for all of their fragility. They lacked the fear and sense of humility that should have come with a reduced life span and such susceptibility to weaknesses both mental and physical, displaying instead a fierce pride and stubbornness and a drive to make the most of their time. Their tenacity was unlike any other, and it was this determination to do as much in a paltry ninety years as others might in thousands that so endeared them to him. He lay beside his Clara and gazed up at the lights surrounding them, but it was her sleeping face and slightly parted lips that he saw as he slipped into dreams with her.

**Author's Note:**

> If it keeps going, the rating will quite possibly jump to mature, given the themes of the nightmares/memories I'd want to play with. On only a slightly related note, any further chapters will, of course, explore their friendship and eventual relationship.


End file.
